For over 100 years Pine Mountain has been focused on enriching lives and connecting people through Appalachian place-based education for all ages.

INDEX TO ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

An in-depth digital look at the Pine Mountain Settlement School Archive.  The collections include photographs, documents, biographies, objects, video and other materials that  describe the institution from its beginnings in 1913 to the present day. Many documents are available in FULL TEXT. Work is ongoing.

ABOUT THE ARCHIVE

OUR VISION

The Vision of the Pine Mountain Settlement School Archive is to provide a voice that will encourage transformations in our relationship to the cultures of the Appalachian region through access to a unique and extensive body of material about a rural settlement school within the region. The rural settlement school movement and its impact on the people of Eastern Kentucky and the Southern Appalachians is a story that has sometimes been misrepresented, romanticized, or only partially understood. We envision an accessible, deep, vibrant and vital resource that will encourage exploration and collaborative dialogue about the hidden and sometimes contested history of rural settlement schools. We envision a broader dissemination of research materials across all public, private, and federal sectors interested in Southern Appalachian cultures and life. more …

OUR ARCHIVAL MISSION

The Pine Mountain Settlement School archival mission supports the institutional mission and strategic planning goals. Our institutional mission continues a long 105-year history of multiple educational and social enrichment programs centered on the local community and beyond. Once a boarding school with a progressive educational curriculum, Pine Mountain School’s recent educational programming has moved away from residential education to multi-faceted offerings of short-term environmental, cultural, medical, social, agricultural, and art and craft programs and workshops. But, the archive has not moved away from, nor will it move away from, a commitment to Pine Mountain as place and people. more …

To visit the main page for the School click the link below. To access the Archive go to INDEX TO ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS (also at the top of the page).

PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL MAIN PAGE

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WHAT’S NEW! 

FEBRUARY 2019

In various ways, the PMSS staff, students and community of the past have sent us valentines. Through letters, narratives, publications, photographs and reports, they told us who they were and how they lived and worked. And throughout the 100-plus years of the Pine Mountain Settlement School’s existence, forward-thinking people saved these treasures so that succeeding generations may gain a deeper understanding of days gone by.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, here are a few valentines from the past … about valentines:

Valentine Sugar-Cookies: STAPLETON REPORT 1928 – February

Dr. Ira Stapleton and Rev. Robert Stapleton worked at the Line Fork Medical Settlement from 1926 through 1937. Dr. Stapleton sent reports back to their employer, Katherine Pettit, and the PMSS Board of Trustees on a quarterly and monthly basis. The reports detailed much about dealing with the many health issues they encountered but they also recorded their daily interactions with members of the local community. In a 1928 report, Dr. Ira Stapleton wrote:

I made some Valentine sugar-cookies and they were so good Grandpap and Bennet “‘lowed they must have come from the store.” I felt quite complimented as I do not make cookies very often….Finding two heart-shaped cookie cutters among the kitchen furnishings I was tempted to make some for the school children at Bear Branch and there was enough for the birthday-man also. The smaller was placed on top of the larger one and when baked stood out in a pretty relief.

Valentine Party: PINE CONE 1933 March

THE PINE CONE was a literary publication written and published by PMSS students during the Boarding School years and intermittently printed in later years. The Pine Cone was also printed as a general newsletter with the first publication produced in 1929. Here is one of the articles appearing on page 3 in the March 1933 issue.

VALENTINE PARTY
Great was our delight when we each received an invitation to go the Valentine Party in costume Saturday night, Feb. 18. We went and had a good time playing games. Refreshments were served and prizes were given for the funniest, best costumed, prettiest and those who came the nearest pinning on the tail of a donkey in the right place. There was a good place for fishing so we fished for our fortunes. My! I hope some of them don’t come true.

Valentine Cards: ALICE COBB STORIES Handing Over Divide Sunday School to Miss Cold, June 1937

In Alice Cobb’s letter to Miss Edith Cold, who was replacing Miss Cobb as a Sunday School teacher, she describes the part of the Sunday School schedule during which the children do “handwork.”  

There are plenty of scissors, crayons, and pencils in the Sunday School shelf, a few Sunday School papers, lots of blank paper, and some valentine, birthday, and Easter cards. I use the Christmas cards every week. They simply love them, and look forward to a card with the paper. To show how much they treasure even the most worthless thing — I gave one of the little boys a handful of scraps from the drawer to put in the stove, and he asked if he might have them to take home!

Valentine Cards: COMMUNITY GROUP ASSEMBLY May 20, 1942

First-hand accounts, written by students and presented at the Community Group Assembly, describe their part in the work of the Community Group and the Co-op program at Pine Mountain that took the students out into the community to work with families. Here is an excerpt from a report presented by Flora Mae Ford:

School is no more than well started when along comes the succession of holidays — Columbus Day, Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine Day, and Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays, Easter — and the teachers are anxious to have room decorations made, the children want to make mementos of those days to take home, too. … Of course there is no greater joy for us than when we prepare a Christmas treat for each child and deliver it on the last visit before the vacation — unless it’s when the valentine box is opened and we find lots of valentines (the kinds we have taught them to make) addressed to us.

Love Letters: MARGARET KRAATZ WRIGHT CORRESPONDENCE 1930-1932

In the mood to read love letters? The letters of Margaret Kraatz Wright, an eager PMSS teacher during the early 1930s, tell that kind of story. Romancing her future husband through correspondence, Margaret takes a journey that is humorous, touching, incomprehensible, and often maddening, but a journey that eventually won her a lifetime partner.

One of the larger collections of personal letters in the Pine Mountain staff holdings are digitized at MARGARET KRAATZ WRIGHT CORRESPONDENCE 1930-1932, providing images of the letters and accompanying summaries. If the reader follows the summaries or is patient with the idiosyncracies of her handwriting in the images, the stories will charm and engage.

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 SEE WHAT’S NEW! ARCHIVE for older featured collections.

For example: GUIDE TO FAMILIES IN PINE MOUNTAIN VALLEY COMMUNITY.

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COMMENTS and CONTACT

Comments and feedback regarding the material on this website or on the institutional history are welcomed. Comments directly on the website are not enabled.

Please contact office@pinemountainsettlementschool.com or (606) 558-3571 with your inquiries and comments. We welcome your identification of people and activities on our site and, particularly, corrections to the record. Please see OUR PRIVACY POLICY and contact our office if you believe we have violated your rights to privacy.

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ACCESS GUIDELINES

PMSS ARCHIVE MISSION STATEMENT (extended)

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ADMINISTRATIVE INFORMATION

COLLECTION DONATIONS

DONOR AGREEMENT

ORAL HISTORY RELEASE AGREEMENT

LIFE HISTORY FORM

ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION – PRINCIPLES AND BEST PRACTICES

POLICIES & PROCEDURES

USE OF IMAGES RELEASE FORM

USE AGREEMENT (Reproduction Request Form)

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ABOUT OCR TEXT

Many of the texts included in this site have been automatically generated using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. In some cases, these texts have not been manually reviewed or corrected.

OCR enables searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is not 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original publication and its condition at the time of microfilming. Publications with poor quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple column layouts or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.

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CITATION OF MATERIALS

Any PUBLIC use of material must properly cite Pine Mountain Settlement School in the following manner:

 “[Identification of Item],” [Collection Name] [Series Number, if applicable]. [date], Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, KY. [date accessed]

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STATEMENT REGARDING PRIVACY

The manuscript collections and archival records in the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections may contain sensitive and/or confidential information derived from historical archives that may be protected under federal and state right to privacy laws and regulations. Researchers who wish to publish and users who may share material from the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections are advised by this notice that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in some collections within the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g. may be a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy if facts concerning an individual’s private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person for which Pine Mountain Settlement School assumes no responsibility.

If you believe that your privacy rights have been invaded please notify the following. 

office@pinemountainsettlementschool.com

OUR PRIVACY POLICY

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See INDEX TO COLLECTIONS for an overview of collections and series.

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